Making and Meaning in Insular Art. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Insular Art Held at Trinity College Dublin, 25-28 August 2005 (review)

This volume contains a selection of the papers presented at the fifth International Conference on Insular Art in Dublin in August 2005. As one would expect, there is a strong Irish presence, but the papers feature a wide variety of topics relating to archaeological and art-historical themes in Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales.

The volume begins with three excellent papers by Lawrence Nees (University of Delaware) on belt-mounts in the Sutton Hoo hoard (pp. 1-17), Niamh Whitfield (Christie's Education, London) on the origins of motifs in Insular filigree (pp. 18-39), and Anna Gannon (University of Cambridge) on Anglo-Saxon zoomorphic pins. In the context of the sensational recent discovery of the magnificent Staffordshire hoard (containing almost 1500 items of early Anglo-Saxon fine metalwork), these studies offer an essential introduction to the proper evaluation of that exciting new material.

Scotland features in the papers by Mark Hall (Perth Museum) on some recently discovered metalwork fragments from Perthshire (pp. 70-78) and Isabel Henderson (Ross & Cromarty, Scotland) on the remarkable recovery of lost sections of the great Hilton of Cadboll cross-slab (pp. 198-214). Hall's paper is not helped by the poor quality of the black-and-white illustrations that accompany it—a curious contrast to the excellent ones in Henderson's paper. Sculpture also features in the papers on Irish high-crosses by Roger Stalley (Trinity College, Dublin) on artistic identity and the tell-tale features that might distinguish individual sculptors (pp. 153-66) and Peter Harbison (Royal Irish Academy, Dublin) on the sources of the imagery of classical animals (centaurs, griffins, and so forth) that appear on the Irish crosses. Whereas Harbison finds his inspiration in the now familiar Carolingian and post-Carolingian sculpture of continental European workshops, Stalley identifies a Muiredach Master active at Monasterboice (County Louth) and, interestingly enough, remarks that the iconographical repertoire in the Irish crosses has no analogues either in Pictland or Northumbria. He notes: "Indeed the very uniqueness of the Irish sculpture crosses gives the impression that the inspiration came either from within Ireland itself or from much further afield" (p. 163).

The excellent survey of early-medieval sculpture in southwest Wales (pp. 184-97) by Nancy Edwards (Bangor University) should perhaps be read in conjunction with the iconographical analysis of the so-called marigold-stone at Carndonagh (County Donegal) by Conor Newman and Niamh Walsh (National University of Ireland, Galway), as the illustrations used here hardly do justice to the quality of the 3D-scanned originals. The Welsh material, by contrast, is much broader in scope and more convincing in Edwards's demonstration of an Irish Sea area of mutual influence from the post-Roman period to the Viking era.

Somewhat surprisingly, Irish metalwork is only briefly featured in the discussion (pp. 50-69) of the figural iconography on the Soiscél Molaise and Stowe Missal shrines, by Paul Mullarkey (National Museum of Ireland, Dublin) and a survey of the construction and characteristics of Insular-type crosiers (pp. 79-94) by Griffin Murray (Kerry County Museum, Tralee). Both are excellent and comprehensive contributions, but again both suffer from the poor quality of the black-and-white illustrations. Other contributions that can be loosely linked are the ones by Tomás Ó Carragáin (University College Cork) on skeuomorphs and spolia in Irish pre-Romanesque architecture (pp. 95-109) and Jenifer Ní Ghrádaigh (University College Cork) on evidence from Old Irish (Brehon) law texts for the status of the stone-mason (sáer); this latter piece follows up on a pioneering 1995 paper by Doug Mac Lean. Unfortunately, Ó Carrag...